Thanksgiving Toward the Past, Faith Toward the Future

A Parable: The Anvil

Let's begin with a parable today. Once upon a time in land
before there were any cars or modern machines - a time when horses
and carriages and wagons were common on the dirt roads - there was
a blacksmith shop with a large, heavy, well-worn anvil. One day a
little farm boy, who had never left the farm, came with his father
to town for the first time. Everything was new and different. As he
walked with his father down the unpaved main street, he heard a
loud clang . . . clang . . . clang. He said to his father, "What's
that?" His father said, "Come, I'll show you." He took his son to
the door of the blacksmith's shop. And there the boy saw a huge
man, a strong man, lifting a big, heavy hammer with a long handle
and a large head on it high in the air, as if to chop down a tree,
and then crashing it down on a glowing piece of metal on top of the
anvil. He hit the anvil so hard that it made the boy wince with
every blow. His father explained to him that this was a blacksmith
who made all kinds of metal pieces for wagons and carriages and
plows and tools and horseshoes.

But the little boy was fixed on one thing: the long, heavy
hammer and the great metal anvil. They met each other with such a
loud sound and with such a force that he thought surely this anvil
could not last long. The big, strong blacksmith paused for a moment
to catch his breath, and saw the boy standing in the doorway.
"Aren't you going to break that thing?" the boy asked, pointing at
the anvil. But the blacksmith smiled and said, "This anvil is a
hundred years old and has worn out many hammers."

The Bible: Forged in the Furnace of Truth

Here's the point of the parable. The Bible is an anvil that has
worn out a thousand hammers. In every generation, new, huge, heavy
hammers are forged against the truth of the Bible. And strong men
lift the hammers and pound on the Scriptures. People with no
historical perspective - like little boys who've never been to town
- see it and say, "Surely the Bible will be destroyed." But others
who know their history a little better say, "This Bible was forged
in the furnace of divine truth and has worn out many hammers."

In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah said, "The grass
withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever"
(Isaiah 40:8). And Jesus said, "Heaven and earth will pass away,
but My words will not pass away" (Matthew 24:35).

Why is this? Why has the Bible worn out a thousand hammers? Why
does the Bible survive generation after generation as a living and
powerful book in the lives of millions of people? The answer can be
found in two observations: one is that God endures from generation
to generation. And the other is that the Bible is the Word of
God.

In Psalm 90:1-2 Moses says, "Lord, You have been our dwelling
place in all generations. Before the mountains were born, or You
gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to
everlasting, You are God." And in the New Testament, Hebrews 13:8
says, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever."
The reason the Bible has worn out a thousand hammers is because it
is the Word of God who endures from everlasting to everlasting, and
because its central character is Jesus Christ who is the same
yesterday, today and forever.

Bubbles and Fads

There are two reasons why I point this out. One is that I want
to build my life on something that lasts. And I think most of you
would share this desire. I don't want to build my life on sand. I
don't want to spend my life chasing bubbles that shimmer with
beauty and pop as soon as you catch them. I want to build my life
on something durable - something like an anvil that breaks a
thousand hammers.

The other reason why I point out the indestructible toughness of
the Bible is to contrast it with the incredibly short shelf-life of
the ever-changing remedies and treatments and schemes of hope in
our day. Schemes of hope that leave out of account God and Christ
and sin and salvation and repentance and death and heaven and hell.
They leave these great realities out of consideration as if they
were non-realities or inconsequential, like unicorns and Cyclopses
and flat-earth theories. These treatments and remedies and schemes
of hope put themselves forward with great forcefulness. But how
many people notice how short is the life of God-neglecting promises
of hope?

Let me illustrate what I mean, and I give credit here to David
Powlison in an article titled "Biological Psychiatry" (The Journal
of Biblical Counseling, 17/3, Spring, 1999, pp. 2-8). I don't know
if you have noticed yet, but there has been a sea change in the
world of mental health in the last five years or so. When was the
last time you heard anybody talking about codependency? Just twelve
years ago this was all the rage. Melody Beattie's Codependent No
More and John Bradshaw's Homecoming were best-sellers. Wherever you
turned, from books to talk shows to seminars, the diagnosis of our
problems was the same: dysfunctional families of origin. Past
emotional pain and emptiness were the primal causes of our present
misery and misbehavior. And the remedy? Psychotherapy with
sensitive non-judgmental counselors and support groups with those
who felt your pain and understood your woundedness.

That was in its heyday of the eighties. But then something
changed. Something always changes. Diagnoses and remedies that are
not built on the full embrace of God's Word must always fade. These
things slip up on you. And you suddenly realize: hmm, those kinds
of books aren't being written any more. People don't seem to be
talking with the same confidence they used to about the dynamics of
the wounded soul. What ever became of codependency?

What's happened? Well, there's a new excitement, a new scheme of
hope. The new scheme is more biological and less psychological. In
the place of the needy, hurting, wounded soul has now arisen the
dysfunctional brain. It's not the family of origin now that has
center stage, but hormones and genes and chemicals and
neurotransmitters. And what are the new books today? Harold
Koplewicz's It's Nobody's Fault, that explains the problems of
human life in terms of neurotransmitter shortages; and Peter
Kramer's Listening to Prozac, that says we have entered an era of
"cosmetic psychopharmacology."

Here's the way David Powlison describes the shift:

The world did change in the mid-90s. The action is now in your
body. It's what you got from Mom and Dad, not what they did to you.
The excitement is about brain functions, not family dysfunctions.
The cutting edge is in the hard science medical research and
psychiatry, not squishy soft, philosophy-of-life, feel-your-pain
psychologies.

Psychiatry's back. . . . Biology is suddenly hot. Psychiatry has
suddenly broken forth, a blitzkrieg sweeping away all opposition.
The insurance companies love it because drugs seem more like
"medicine," seem to be cheaper than talk, and promise more
predictable results. Psychotherapy professionals are on the
defensive. (Powlison, "Biological Psychiatry," p. 3)

The point is this: I want my life to be built on something more
durable than a 15-year-long therapeutic fad. And make no mistake:
the present craze with genes and hormones and neurotransmitters and
the Human Genome Project and genomic mapping and chemical therapies
- this excitement too will fade and we will move on to something
else. And in its wake will be left vast disillusionment. No
fulfilled life. No fountain of youth. No utopia. No comfort at
death. And millions of people will be left with the question: is
there a more durable hope to build my life on? Is there a diagnosis
of my condition and a remedy for my flaws and a promise for the
future that will not pass by like a fad in one generation, and
leave me feeling like an out-of-date fool using leeches to cure my
headache?

Or to ask it another way: When Ritalin has calmed you down and
Prozac has cheered you up, then what? The promise of these things
seems so big, when it fact the pay-off is so small. All the things
that never change, all the things that last, all the really big
things in life and eternity still wait to be addressed: God,
Christ, sin, redemption, repentance, faith, forgiveness, death,
heaven, hell, eternal life.

The Eternal Realities of the Bible

Which brings us back to where we started: there is a rugged,
unchanging, solid anvil called the Bible. It has outlived all fads
and broken a thousand hammers of criticism. It doesn't sweat the
small stuff very much; its message deals with the big things that
never change from generation to generation. And what is the
message?

The message of the Bible is this. It has to do with four great
realities: God, sin, Christ, faith.

1. God

"In the beginning God . . ." - the first verse of the Bible: "In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).
There is a personal, infinite, eternal, just, loving, holy God who
made this universe and everything in it to reflect his glory - his
greatness and beauty and power and wisdom and justice and mercy. He
had no beginning. He is absolute Reality. He depends on nothing. He
says that his name is simply, "I am" (Exodus 3:14). This great,
personal, eternal God made you to know him and to enjoy him and
display him in the world. The prophet Isaiah said, "Bring My sons
from afar and My daughters from the ends of the
earth, everyone who
is called by My name, and whom I have created for My glory, whom I
have formed, even whom I have made" (Isaiah 43:7). The first great
reality is God, who made us to enjoy and display his glory.

2. Sin

But the second great reality that the Bible teaches us about is
sin. If the purpose of our existence is to know and enjoy and
reflect the glory of God as our highest value, then sin is our
failure to do that. The apostle Paul puts it like this in the
greatest letter ever written, "All have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Notice two things: sin is about
everybody and sin is about God. All of us have sinned. There is no
exception. And sin mainly has to do with our relationship to God,
not man. Sin hurts people. But that's not the main reason it is
evil. The main reason is that God is worthy of our trust and
obedience and worship and our joy, but we treat him like a
raincoat, leaving him in the closet forgotten until it rains hard
enough outside. God is not a raincoat for bad days. He is the Giver
of the sunlight and the Creator of the clouds and the Sustainer of
every breath you take and the Judge of all the living and the
dead.

Therefore, our neglect of God is a great evil and we are guilty
of sin in his presence. The Bible says, "The wages of sin is death"
(Romans 6:23). We are under the sentence of God's eternal judgment.
And we will perish unless God himself provides a Redeemer to save
us from our sin and from his wrath.

3. Christ

Which brings us to the third great reality of the Scriptures:
the central character of history, Jesus Christ. O for a thousand
tongues to describe the greatness of the God-Man Christ Jesus! "In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made
through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. .
. . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and
truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the
Father" (John 1:1-3, 14).

Jesus Christ is the Son of God, eternal, without beginning, but
with the Father from everlasting to everlasting, truly God. And
yet, he was made flesh, that is, became human. Why? Because without
a human nature he couldn't die. But his aim in coming was to die.
He lived to die. Why? Why would God send his Son to die? Because
God's heart toward us is not only wrath flowing from his justice,
but also mercy flowing from his love. And to satisfy both justice
and love, God substituted his Son to die in our place. Jesus said,
"The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to
give His life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). He came to give his
life as a ransom to rescue sinners from hell.

This is the center of Christianity. God sent his own Son to
provide a substitute for all who would be saved from sin. A
substitute life, and a substitute death. Jesus Christ lived a
perfect life of faith and obedience to God. And he died a totally
undeserved, horrific, and obedient death by crucifixion. Therefore,
all of us who are saved by him from the wrath of God are saved
because our sin is laid on him, and his righteousness is credited
to us. "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every
one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us
all" (Isaiah 53:6). "For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew
no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2
Corinthians 5:21).

This is the center and heart of Christianity. This is the
deepest need of every human being that no medicine and no therapy
will ever touch.

4. Faith

Which leaves one last great Biblical reality to mention. What
must I do to be saved by Jesus Christ from my sin? How can I obtain
forgiveness and acceptance with God? How can I prepare to die so
that on the other side of this life I will have everlasting joy in
the presence of God - and in that hope become the kind of
risk-taking, humble, loving, sacrificial person that the world so
desperately needs?

The answer of the Bible is: Trust Christ. "For God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him [that
is, trusts in him] should not perish but have eternal life" (John
3:16). Trust him that everything he says he has done, he has done;
and everything he says he will do, he will do; and everything he
says he is, he is. Trust him, and you will be saved.

And you will live the rest of your life in the place of greatest
healing. Where is that? It is the solid, durable, invincible,
anvil-like place between thankfulness toward the past and faith
toward the future. The aim of psychotherapy and the aim of medicine
is to give us healing. But there is no place of greater, deeper,
more lasting healing than to be in Christ with sins forgiven and
heaven secured, living moment by moment looking back with
thankfulness on all that God has done for us, and looking forward
at all God promises to do for us because of Christ.

It's a great place to live. I invite you, I urge you, trust
Christ and take your eternal place between bygone grace and future
grace where gratitude and faith, thankfulness and confidence fill
the soul and make it well.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books.

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